But do you know what he is really afraid of? artificial intelligence.

Burton said Wednesday that seeing a website that used AI to blend his pictures with Disney characters “really bothered me.”

“It wasn’t an intellectual idea – it was just a visceral, visceral feeling,” Burton told reporters during a preview of “The World of Tim Burton” exhibit at London’s Design Museum. “I looked at those things and I thought, ‘Some of these are pretty cool.’ …This gave me a strange kind of scary feeling inside.

Burton said he believes AI is unstoppable, because “once you can do it, people will do it.” But when asked whether he would use technology in this work, he scoffed.

“To take over the world?” He laughed.

The exhibition features Burton as an analog artist who began experimenting with paint and colored pencils as a child in his suburban California home in the 1960s.

“I wasn’t a very verbal person in the beginning,” Burton said. “Painting was a way to express myself.”

Decades later, after films like “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Beetlejuice,” his ideas still start with drawing. The exhibition features 600 items from movie studio archives and Burton’s personal collection, and traces those ideas as they progressed from sketches through collaborations with set, production and costume designers on their way to the big screen.

London is the final stop for the exhibition on a decade-long tour of 14 cities in 11 countries. It has been reconfigured and expanded with 90 new objects for its run in the British capital, where Burton has lived for a quarter of a century.

The show features early drawings and oddities, including a contest-winning “Crush Litter” sign that a teenage Burton designed for Burbank garbage trucks. There is also a recreation of Burton’s studio, including a paint tray and a “Curse of Frankenstein” mug filled with pencils.

Along with hundreds of paintings, there are props, puppets, set designs and iconic costumes, including Johnny Depp’s “Edward Scissorhands” talents and the black latex Catwoman costume worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in “Batman Returns.”

“In London we had very generous access to Tim’s archive, which was filled with thousands of paintings, storyboards from stop-motion films, sketches, character notes, poems,” said exhibition curator Maria McClintock. “And how to synthesize such a wide-ranging and wandering career within one exhibition was a fun challenge – but definitely a challenge.”

Viewing it was not entirely a fun experience for Burton, who said he was unable to look very closely at the objects on display.

“It’s like seeing your dirty clothes stacked on the walls,” he said. “It is quite surprising. It’s a little overwhelming.”

Burton, whose long-awaited horror-comedy sequel “Beetlejuice” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, is currently filming the second series of Netflix’s Addams Family-themed series “Wednesdays.”

These days he is a major Hollywood director whose American Gothic style has given rise to an epithet – “Bertonxue.” But he still feels like an outsider.

“Once you feel that way, it never leaves you,” he said.

“Every film I did was a struggle,” he said. He noted that early films such as 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and 1988’s “Beetlejuice” received some negative reviews. “It seems like it was a pleasant, wonderful, easy journey, but each one leaves its own emotional scars.”

McClintock said Burton is “an extremely passionate filmmaker.”

“I think that’s what attracted me to his films as a child,” he said. “He really celebrates the misunderstood outcast, the benevolent monster. So spending so much time in his brain and his creative process has been quite a strange but fun experience.

“His films are often described as dark,” he said. “I do not agree with this. And if they are dark, there is a kind of hope in the darkness. You always want to wander around in the dark in his films.

“The World of Tim Burton” opens Friday and runs through April 21, 2025.

Associated Press journalist Kyoung Ha contributed to this story.

This story has corrected that the Catwoman costume is from “Batman Returns”, not “Batman”.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.